Lawrence's anxious rocking-sentences.

Lawrence imposes a commanding, all-knowing voice from the start. What feels very much like a deep, serious (albeit sometimes witty) tone guides us from the offset through a weaving of plot and theme from start to finish. Lawrence does not dwell on showing when he can say “she could not love them” without the reader questioning him.
This piece of information on the mother not loving her children is part of the suffocating mood of doom he gets us in, one where dark abstractions take over the plot sometimes. His voice is cold and distant, observant not so much of how things look, but how they feel. For this reason, metaphors are some of the only images we get. These metaphors are of course decidedly pessimistic, like that hard little place in the mother’s heart.
We know these characters economical abstractions, that description of the mother’s heart, or the boy’s hot blue eyes, for example, reveal much more than when he talks about how many children they were, they quiet servants and their house. But these distant descriptions are there for a reason, they are imperative in painting a backdrop.
Much of Lawrence’s writing is extremely vague, first in his descriptions, then on his plot and eventually even in his dialogue, all playing off the notion of what is not said but merely felt. First, he tells us the father went to “some office”, then, the vagueness creeps into the plot as “these prospects never materialized”. He then goes on to telling us that there was always the “sense of a shortage of money.”
This “sense” embodies Lawrence’s abstractions- his theme moves with repetition into the plot, clouding the division between plot and idea. The theme almost literally creeps into the scene, “it came whispering from the springs”, like a venomous cloud that personifies the toys in the room, making dolls self conscious and wooden horses attentive, it moves through the repetition of “there must be more money!”, creating a tangible anxiety through rhythm, to a point where you can almost see the theme.
Soon, the story gets even more abstract as the anxiety moves from a shortage of money to a shortage of luck, presenting itself in the dialogue of all places.
Paul (almost possessed by the nebulous, haunting theme) asks “Then what is luck, mother?” prompting the mother to answer that a lack of luck means a lack of money, thus establishing that abstraction really does rule their world. Here, repetition of “bitter” pounds the mood, sinking us further into the story’s anxious, cloudy tone.
Paul goes off “vaguely”, “seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it.”- abstraction, repetition, repetition, anxiety... the tittle, after all, refers to a creepy rocking horse: a tangible object turn into mood.